REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
The actor Jeremy Irons on his yawl under the gaze of Kilcoe Castle, in Ireland.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Somewhere between Ballydehob and Skibbereen, the G.P.S. directed me down
a narrow country road toward an indentation in the southwestern Irish
coast called Roaringwater Bay. The castle I was looking for had been one
of the last to fall to the English, in the early 1600s, in a coda to the
historic Battle of Kinsale, which sealed Elizabethan England’s conquest
of Gaelic Ireland. The Crown’s forces had approached on horseback and by
sea, with muskets, swords, and malevolent intent. I was approaching by
appointment, in a white Kia Sportage. The road meandered this way and
that until suddenly, around the last bend, a spectacular sight presented
itself: Kilcoe, a terra-cotta-colored edifice composed of two towers, a
thick one and a thin one, rising from a small island tethered to the
mainland by a short causeway.

I was detected even before I reached the island. Through a slit window
some 50 feet in the air—the kind from which men in metal helmets used
to shoot arrows—a small white dog peered quizzically at my vehicle. At
the castle’s gates, I got out of the car and buzzed the buzzer. A
disembodied voice dictated a numerical code to use on the keypad. I
punched in the numbers, and the gates slowly opened.

Twenty years ago, this place had been a ruin. Old photos I had seen
depicted a run-down structure of weathered gray stone, roofless, its
uppermost surviving floor exposed to the elements and covered in a
carpet of grass and wild shrubbery. But this morning, Kilcoe cut a
mighty figure, its main tower standing 65 feet tall, and the turret,
conjoined to its sibling at the northeast corner, 85 feet. The
crenellations in the towers’ parapets had been reconstructed to
approximate how they must have looked in the 15th century, when the
castle was built by a chieftain of the Clan Dermot MacCarthy. A burgundy
pennant emblazoned with the word KILCOE streamed northwesterly from the
turret’s lookout.

In the courtyard, I walked up to an imposing arched door, its heavy elm
panels dotted with iron studs. Above it, to the left, inlaid in the
wall, was a pale stone slab. Etched into the slab were the following
words:

MANY HEARTS LIE IN THESE WALLS.
FOUR YEARS WE WORKED, AND WE
JUST DID THE BEST WITH WHAT WE KNEW.
AND WHAT WE DID YOU SEE.
A.D. 2002

Just as I began to wonder if my knocks on the big door were being heard,
a smaller, hitherto unnoticed cutout door within the big door popped
open, and through the opening bent the lanky body and familiar face of
Jeremy Irons. It was an entrance evocative of Gene Wilder’s halting,
hobbled first appearance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Irons
looked ashen as he beckoned me in and led the way, with a conspicuous
limp, up a flight of outdoor stairs. Had living in this remote locale
turned the handsome actor into a rickety invalid?

No, false alarm. Irons informed me that he had only recently awoken and
was in momentary foot pain from a flare-up of plantar fasciitis. Within
minutes, having drunk a mugful of coffee and smoked the first of the
many hand-rolled cigarettes he goes through in a day, he had, like
Wonka, unfurled into his full, charismatic self, ready to expound on a
magical world born of his imagination.

“I remember the very first night I spent here on my own,” he said.
“It’s a very interesting building, because it’s very male and erect: a
phallus. And yet, within, it’s a womb. Very strange like that. And I
thought, I’m completely protected. I’m away from everything. It’s a
wonderful feeling. And that’s what it gives me.”

HIGH-RISE
From left, the castle before Irons began restoration, 1997; renovations in progress, 2001; a roof over his head, 1999.

Photos by Brian Hope.

Irons, I learned after two days at his side, is a man serenely
comfortable in his own skin. He speaks without inhibition and does
whatever he feels like doing, whether it’s sailing his yawl, the Willing
Lass, heedlessly through the stiff gales of Roaringwater Bay, driving
the local roads in his pony trap (his preferred, Anglo-Irish term for a
horse-drawn carriage), or interrupting his houseguests’ sleep with
theatrical wake-up announcements delivered through the intercom system
that he rigged up to reach all the rooms in the castle. At the time of
my visit, he had two friends staying over, both women. “Good morning,
ladies!,” he intoned through the intercom, his plummy Jeremy Irons
voice echoing throughout the ancient building. “It’s a lovely day. The
sky is dry; the wind is low. Please come down to the smell of burning
toast.”

His country uniform was a loose-weave three-button sweater worn over a
Henley shirt, with baggy French workman’s trousers in a blue herringbone
pattern and slip-on duck boots paired with red ragg-wool socks.
Outdoors, he completed this ensemble with a backward-turned tweed cap.
On any other human being save Samuel L. Jackson, this outfit would have
looked ridiculous. On him, it looked smashing.

Kilcoe is at once stately-home beautiful and slightly mad—a 360-degree immersion in its owner’s eccentric psyche.

His body language, too, is something to behold. At 69, he has held on to
his looks and still leans against walls and sprawls across sofas with
the languid grace of Charles Ryder, the character he played in
Brideshead Revisited, the 1981 British mini-series that sealed his
stardom. What’s more, he has a dog, Smudge, who mimics his regal
movements. A terrier mix procured by Irons from a shelter—it was she
who first spotted me pulling up to the castle—Smudge accompanied Irons
everywhere we went (with her master’s constant reinforcement: “There’s
a good girl, Smudger!”) and followed his every cue: casting her glance
pensively seaward when he did, matching him pace for pace as he bounded
up Kilcoe’s steep staircases.

A man would need to be this self-assured in order to take on the
daunting task of restoring a castle that had sat unoccupied for the
better part of 400 years. And he would have to be especially trusting in
his instincts—and, perhaps, a little reckless—to assume direct
oversight of the project, as Irons did, with no credentialed architect,
general contractor, or medievalist at his side.

“It was a load of amateurs setting to, following our noses,” Irons
said. At any given moment, he told me, 30 to 40 people were puttering
away on the premises—a motley assemblage of personal friends, Irish
locals, and itinerant masons, woodworkers, and other craftsmen. “I told
them all,” he said, “‘What you need to remember is that what we’re
doing is a jazz theme on the medieval.’”

If that phrase conjures unwelcome images of suits of armor draped in
animal-print throws while the music of Kenny G tootles faintly through
hidden speakers, despair not. Kilcoe, while not remotely a faithful
re-creation of what it was 600 years ago—it offers such modern
features as hot and cold running water, electricity, and Wi-Fi—is a
magnificent place: at once stately-home beautiful and slightly mad, a
360-degree immersion in its owner’s eccentric psyche.

Kilcoe Castle on Roaring Water Bay on the south western coast of Ireland.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

The actor Jeremy Irons on his yawl under the gaze of Kilcoe Castle, in Ireland.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons with his Smudge, his loyal terrier-­‐mix, on their way to the stables led by Winnie, a 18 year old Friesan.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

The doorway of the master suite decorated with art and treasures from Irons’s travels.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

Another view of the guest room.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons and Smudge on the pony trap, trundling toward the stables.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons and Smudge with Kilcoe looking on.

Photo: Photograph by Simon Upton.

Kilcoe Castle on Roaring Water Bay on the south western coast of Ireland.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

The actor Jeremy Irons on his yawl under the gaze of Kilcoe Castle, in Ireland.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons with his Smudge, his loyal terrier-­‐mix, on their way to the stables led by Winnie, a 18 year old Friesan.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The doorway of the master suite decorated with art and treasures from Irons’s travels.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

A section of the main living area of Kilcoe Castle, known as the, “Solar,” with art and treasures from Irons’s travels.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons at the hearth in the “Solar” the Castle’s main living and entertaining area.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

MAN OF THE WORLD

Kilcoe’s main living area, known as the “solar,” showcases art and collectibles acquired by Irons in his travels.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The Irish Fiddler, Frankie Gavin, entertaining Jeremy Irons and guests on a stormy evening at Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The gallery, overlooking the solar.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

A guest room, its ceiling woven of willow branches.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

SUITE DREAMS

The master bedroom, with Irons’s suspended bed.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The master suite’s bathtub.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The main staircase, built with defense in mind.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Jeremy hoisting the sails of his yawl on Roaring Water Bay near his restored Kilcoe Castle on the southwestern coast of Ireland.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

TIME MACHINE

The master and a companion sail past a fully restored Kilcoe Castle.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The kitchen.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The kitchen at Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The landing at the top of the tower stairs at Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons and Smudge in a favorite spot at Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons’s desk in the gallery.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The master suite's adjoining bathroom.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

A nook in the main living area, “the Solar,” of Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Kilcoe’s workshop

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The billiards room. The ceiling is made of woven willow panels.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Another view of the guest room.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons and Smudge on the pony trap, trundling toward the stables.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Irons and Smudge with Kilcoe looking on.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The castle’s showpiece is its double-height main living area, located on
the third of the main tower’s four floors and known in medieval
manor-house terminology as the solar (in Irons’s pronunciation, the
“so-lahr”).

Making use of the big tower’s full width and depth, roughly 32 feet by
40, the room is pleasingly busy, assimilating all manner of art, objets,
and materials that Irons has collected, magpie-like, in his travels:
carpets from Morocco, a Nepalese yoke for leading around a camel, an old
Roman-style threshing board known as a tribulum, a fiddle he had made in
Slovakia (he dabbles in playing), a life-size antique wooden horse that
he found in the Cotswolds but believes to have originally come from an
American tack shop.

The solar benefits from a surprising amount of natural light, given how
monolithic and fortress-like Kilcoe appears from the outside. The room’s
tall, oblong windows, refurbished by Irons but unchanged in their
positioning, are aligned to offer views that look out, as confirmed by
my iPhone’s compass, precisely to the north, south, east, and west.

At the center of the room, beneath a wrought-iron chandelier from
France, is a conversation pit bounded by a large hearth and two sofas
upholstered becomingly in celadon-colored cloth (“Liberty’s of London
with the fabric on backwards”). Overlooking the solar on all four sides
is a gallery, which supplies still more living space: on its western
side, a library-cum-office for Irons, and, on its eastern side, an
intimate den with a grand piano, a woodstove, and a TV nook (though
Irons, not a big fan of television, keeps his flat-screen hidden behind
a slide-up painting of the quarry in nearby Castlehaven, from which much
of the stone for Kilcoe’s restoration was procured).

The castle sleeps 13 people, with most of the bedrooms and bathrooms
tucked away in the five-story turret. Irons’s master suite is the
exception, built atop the solar and gallery, a sort of deluxe captain’s
quarters whose elaborate, arching wood roof—”I love it because it’s
like being inside an upturned boat” he said—is inspired by the attic
of a circa-A.D.-1100 farmhouse in which he spent some time while making
the film The Man in the Iron Mask in France.

“It’s a very interesting building,” said Irons, “because it’s very
male and erect: a phallus. And yet, within, it’s a womb.”

Fittingly for the adopted residence of an actor, Kilcoe comes inbuilt
with drama. To reach the solar from the entry level, one must ascend the
castle’s main staircase, which is long, narrow, and steeply pitched.
Irons pointed out a series of holes notched in the walls on both sides,
at about head height. These were for crossbeams from which wooden panels
could swing down, impeding an invader’s progress up the steps. “You’d
be coming up, wanting to get in,” Irons explained to me from the top
landing, “and I’d have a lance or poker, which could push you in the
eye from above.” Smudge, at his ankle, glared downward accordingly.

So, how did an Irish castle that had been both conquered and effectively
abandoned by the English come to be restored to its former glory by, of
all people, an Englishman?

Twenty years ago, Irons told me, he found himself restless, in need of a
challenge. “I relish risk,” he said. “Risk is extra life.” For a
long time, his acting work satisfied this need. He enjoyed working with
the pervy, iconoclastic film directors David Cronenberg and Barbet
Schroeder, playing twin gynecologists in the former’s Grand Guignol
horror-thriller Dead Ringers and winning an Oscar for his portrayal of
the aristocratic Claus von Bülow (who had been accused of trying to
murder his wife, Sunny) in the latter’s Reversal of Fortune.

But by the late 1990s he had grown bored with film acting and felt he
had plateaued career-wise, especially given his steadfast refusal to
move to Los Angeles, a city he has no love for. A few years earlier, he
and his wife, the actress Sinéad Cusack, had bought a modest getaway
cottage that sits along the river Ilen, which winds through the western
part of Ireland’s County Cork. They fixed up the cottage and named it
Teach Iasc, Irish for Fish House. (The couple make their main home in
Oxfordshire, England.) With their two young sons, Sam and Max, they
spent many a day exploring nearby islands and waterways by boat. The
ruin of Kilcoe, about 10 minutes away, became a favorite picnicking
spot, where Irons and the boys enjoyed scampering up the walls to view
the bay from perilous heights.

Irons and Smudge in a favorite spot at Kilcoe.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

Around 1997 the thought occurred to him that he might look into buying
Kilcoe and bringing it back to life. Doing so would present precisely
the sort of challenge that he craved. Furthermore, he had just completed
Lolita, Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s ever
radioactive novel of a teacher’s affair with a pubescent girl, “so,”
Irons dryly told me, “I knew things would be slower.”

The more he contemplated Kilcoe, the more urgent became the notion of
owning it. The influx of foreign investment that was to make Ireland
temporarily flush at the turn of the century—transforming it into the
so-called Celtic Tiger—was newly under way, and Irons was fearful, he
said, “that someone would come along with too much money and mess the
place up.” Some discreet inquiries were made, and, before the year was
out, Kilcoe was his.

In Cusack’s amused recollection, Irons had already bought the castle by
the time he got around to telling her. “I was very shocked, and
hyperventilated immediately,” she told me by phone from Oxfordshire.
(She was not at Kilcoe when I visited.) “I’m still hyperventilating, to
this day,” she said, “both at the beauty of what he’s done and because
of the amount of breath it takes to get from the bottom of the stairs to
the top.”

But she was supportive of her husband’s endeavor. It was no coincidence,
Cusack noted, that Irons, who was born in 1948, was soon to turn 50. “I
did see it very much as Jeremy’s midlife crisis, and that he should get
on with it,” she said. “Also, I understood where the need came from.
Jeremy can’t bear waste. He can’t throw things out. I think he saw that
castle as a beautiful ruin that needed to be saved, that needed not to
die.”

Irons furnished me with a three-page memoirette of his involvement with
Kilcoe that provides useful context. There was a time, long ago, when he
was young and not so self-confident: an accountant’s son from the Isle
of Wight who, even after he took the audacious step in his teens of
pursuing an actor’s life, still felt he needed someone “to draw me out
from the cold, passionless Anglo-Saxon that I feared I was,” he writes.

That someone turned out to be a young woman from a celebrated family of
Irish actors, “my girl from Dublin, wild, raucous, damaged, and quite
quite lovely.” Cusack, to whom Irons has been married since 1978,
succeeded in loosening him up, but even she, as a Dubliner, knew little
of rural, distant West Cork. It was while visiting their friend David
Puttnam, the English film producer and former head of Columbia Pictures,
that they first laid eyes upon the dwelling that became Teach Iasc;
Puttnam had just restored a farmhouse nearby.

As Irons relates, he came to understand that West Cork represents the
end of the “hippie trail”: an informal pathway through the South of
England, Wales, and Ireland that, for decades, has been hitchhiked,
motorcycled, and camper-vanned (with a ferry ride thrown in) by European
adventurers of bohemian proclivity. “Painters, carpenters,
acupuncturists, songwriters, restaurateurs, stonemasons, mechanics,
thatchers, weavers, jewelers,” he writes. “The list was endless for
this group that was accepted with kind amusement by the indigenous
farmers and fishermen, who gave us all the umbrella title of
‘blow-in.’”

Irons and Puttnam were posh versions of blow-ins, but blow-ins
nonetheless. Through Puttnam, Irons became acquainted with another of
their kind, a renowned English architect named Wycliffe Stutchbury, who
lived in a nearby fishing village called Union Hall. Known as Winky,
Stutchbury had overseen the renovation of Puttnam’s house, and, before
long, was doing the same for Irons and Cusack. His work was not yet
complete when, one fateful day while on vacation in the South of France,
Winky Stutchbury stood up in a restaurant, declaimed, “I am now going
to speak ex cathedra: The most important thing in the world is love!,”
and promptly collapsed, dying instantly at the table at the age of 65.

Among those Stutchbury left behind was a daughter, Bena, whom he had
taken on as a trainee, intending to teach her everything he knew about
architectural draftsmanship. Bena dutifully wrote Irons a letter
notifying him of her father’s passing and absolving him of any further
obligation to be a client; she’d had all of 12 weeks’ training. But
Irons admired Bena’s innate ability and personal style. She was a
motorcyclist, as Irons is, and he insisted that she finish the cottage
project. Which she did, much to Irons and Cusack’s liking.

MAN OF THE WORLD
Kilcoe’s main living area, known as the “solar,” showcases art and collectibles acquired by Irons in his travels.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

When, a few years later, Irons confided to Bena Stutchbury his desire to
buy Kilcoe, she informed him of a coincidence: the current owner of the
castle and the island upon which it sat was a cousin of hers. As it
turned out, this cousin, Mark Wycliffe Samuel, was an archaeologist who
was in the process of completing a doctoral thesis, “The Tower Houses
of West Cork,” rooted in his own deep affinity for Kilcoe. Samuel
proved amenable to selling the castle to Irons.

The hard work of making Kilcoe habitable again began in 1998 and took
six years, wrapping up in 2004. (Irons’s lyrical “Many hearts lie in
these walls” paean to this process went up a couple of years before the
job was truly complete.) Stutchbury, her slender résumé notwithstanding,
was brought in as Irons’s de facto architect, H.R. department, and
administrator. For the position of project foreman, Irons brought in
Brian Hope, his go-to man since the 1980s for the upkeep of his
Oxfordshire house.

An affable Englishman with the shaggy, mischievous mien of an old Led
Zeppelin roadie with tales to tell, Hope told me that he was undaunted
by Irons’s ambition. “I told Jeremy, ‘It’s a great idea—off we
go!’” he said. Like Irons and Stutchbury, he, too, owed his
qualifications to life experience rather than any accrediting
organization. A blacksmith’s son and a photographer by training, Hope
had picked up various trade skills while knocking around Europe and
America as a young man—for example, working in the 70s with George
Harrison’s longtime assistant, Terry Doran, to build a rock-band
rehearsal studio in Los Angeles.

Still, Hope was shrewd enough to recognize that the scope of the Kilcoe
project would require Irons to buy, rather than rent, their equipment
and materials: tiers of scaffolding, a crane, a generator, a forklift.
He also set up a work yard in the field that bordered the causeway. “We
built a blacksmith’s workshop, a stonemason’s workshop, and a carpentry
workshop, and had teams of guys working away,” Hope said. The land was
leased by Irons from his new neighbor, a farmer who, according to the
actor, soon “took to telling friends that he was ‘the most important
man in Jeremy Irons’s life.’”

It didn’t take long for word to get out in West Cork that Jeremy
Irons—yes, that one—was restoring a castle, and hiring, no less. A
steady stream of visitors trekked their way to Kilcoe, some of them
seasoned tradesmen, some of them hippie-trail pilgrims simply keen to
earn some cash or become part of the scene. Hope was careful to hire
licensed professionals to handle the plumbing and the wiring. But Irons,
for all the specificity of his vision, was remarkably open-minded about
giving the randos a chance to contribute. It was Stutchbury, whose
office was a trailer parked at the causeway’s entrance, who served as
Team Kilcoe’s first point of contact with the various characters who
showed up.

“Anybody who wanted a job, I’d ask, ‘What can you do?’” she told me.
“A lot of them couldn’t do anything. They were just . . . people.
But, knowing Jeremy’s taste, I would ask, ‘Are you a motorcyclist or a
musician?’ If you were, you’d be moved up on the list. Or if you had a
silly name. There was a painter who came and said his name was Anthony
Cumberbatch. Jeremy said, ‘I have to have him on my payroll. Hire
him!’”

TIME MACHINE
The master and a companion sail past a fully restored Kilcoe Castle.

Photograph by Simon Upton.

The least skilled of the new arrivals were given jobs sweeping the
scaffolding, or, in the early days, simply pulling out the vegetation
and earth lodged between the walls’ stones, a laborious process that
needed to get done before repointing could begin. Some of the people who
materialized turned out to be gifted artisans, if offbeat ones. There
was the pair of Germans who happened along the road one day in stovepipe
hats and tailcoats, observing an archaic rite known as Wanderjahr, in
which apprentice craftsmen, upon completing their training, spend
several years journeying and improving upon their craft, their costumes
conveying to potential employers that they are not vagabonds. One of the
Germans was a carpenter and the other a stonemason. “They carved all
our figurative windows, and then, after six months, they were off,”
said Irons.

There was an English sculptor-slash-flautist who, because he was a
practicing Buddhist, carved the castle’s Sheela na gig—a gargoylish
female figure with splayed legs and exaggeratedly large genitalia, often
found above the entryways of medieval Irish buildings—in a style more
Asian than Irish, with a Buddha-like potbelly. There was the emotionally
unsteady but sublimely skilled Argentinean carpenter who did intricate,
wavy woodwork on and around the toilet in Irons’s private bathroom—but
worked so deliberately that he had to be let go. (And burst into tears
upon receiving the news.)

For all the hiccups, the renovation process fell into a steady rhythm,
sometimes to transportive effect. “I’d hear the tap-tap-tapping of
people picking stone, and the sounds of giggles and people making
jokes,” Stutchbury said, “and I thought, This must be very like living
in medieval mode.” At many a workday’s end, Irons and Hope, both hobby
guitarists, would join their fellow musician-workers for an acoustic jam
session at the pub up the road.

Irons did sometimes exasperate the crew with his whims and demands. When
he told the stonemasons that their first pass at the main tower’s
crenellations was a bit off, the “teeth” too many in number, and too
small—necessitating their demolition and a rebuild—one Irish mason
looked him in the eye and said, “Jeremy, do you know what the problem
with working for actors is? The feckin’ rehearsals.”

But generally his instincts proved sharp. Early on, Irons noticed
twig-like striations in the mortar on the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the
main tower’s second floor, which is now a game room occupied by a large
snooker table. Doing some research, Irons learned that, in medieval
times, builders formed arched ceilings by bending into place a series of
large wicker panels made of pliant, weaving-friendly woods such as hazel
and willow, and holding these panels aloft from below with strong timber
posts. The builders would then lay stones and mortar above the panels.
Once the mortar squeezed through the woven panels and dried, the arches
would hold themselves, and the underlying timber posts were removed.
This backstory warmed Irons to the idea of using wicker panels as a
decorative element throughout Kilcoe. He found a German-born weaver
based in Cork, Katrin Schwart, to make such panels for the game room’s
ceiling, and the results proved so spectacular that Schwart’s ornate
wickerwork is now a motif throughout the castle, appearing on
guest-bedroom ceilings, in the headboard of Irons’s own bed, and even on
the outer frame of his bathtub.

The castle’s color, too, was an Irons inspiration. The original thought
was to leave Kilcoe’s exterior much as it appeared, as a fortress of
gray stone. But no amount of pointing and repointing could keep the
castle’s interior dry. Even though the walls are about five feet deep,
the high winds that accompany the winter rains in Roaringwater Bay
resulted in “a puddle the size of a car in the solar,” Stutchbury
said. So the walls needed to be harled, to use the Scottish term:
covered in a thick layer of lime mortar. On top of the harling went
several coats of limewash, a mixture of water and calcium oxide. Irons
first tried applying the limewash in a cream color, but it made the
castle “look a bit like a vibrator,” he said. In the end, he had the
outermost coats of limewash mixed with iron sulfate, a compound that
goes on pale green but turns rust-colored with oxidation.

“Jeremy can’t bear waste,” said his wife, Sinéad Cusack. “I think he
saw that castle as a beautiful ruin that needed to be saved.”

For a time in the early aughts, English and Irish newspapers made a
scandal of Kilcoe’s new finish, with a Telegraph reporter claiming that
the locals were angry at the castle’s “sudden transformation from
weathered gray to warm pink.” Irons dismisses these stories as
nonsense, and, besides, even at dusk, with the twilight sky working its
spell, you’d have to be lysergically loaded to construe the building’s
color as pink. In the years since, Irons’s
ocher-rust-whatever-you-like-to-call-it version of Kilcoe has become a
beloved West Cork landmark, its warm coloring and bayside positioning
making it look as if it sits in a perpetual golden twilight.

For my second and final night at Kilcoe, Irons arranged a big dinner in
the solar, with mussels harvested from the bay (the waters are scored
with floats and longlines that hold ropes upon which the mollusks grow),
a roaring fire, a large collection of guests, and an entertainer, the
Irish fiddler Frankie Gavin.

Irons had exchanged his pullover for an embroidered, floor-skirting
scarlet robe, which he wore with aplomb, as if it were the most normal
thing in the world for an Englishman approaching 70 who lives in a
medieval Irish castle to be wearing. (He has two such robes, the other
one, in green, given to him by Hamid Karzai, the former president of
Afghanistan, “after I congratulated him on being the only national
leader who seemed to dress with any flair.”) Two of his guests were
older Irish gents, veterans of Kilcoe’s restoration: Tim Collins, the
project’s gregarious, worldly electrician, and James Whooley, a
soft-spoken retired farmer who has spent his whole life in the area and
took on a second career as Team Kilcoe’s crane operator—it was he who
carefully maneuvered the piano and wooden horse up and over the castle’s
roof, whereupon others in the crew lowered the objects through a
hatchway in the floor of Irons’s bedroom. (“No margin for error on the
horse job,” Collins told me. “It cost £14,000—sterling!”)

After we had finished eating, Irons asked his guests to gather around in
the conversation pit, where Gavin played a couple of songs and told a
few groaners. Irons jumped in to tell a few of his own. Collins stood
up, pre-emptively apologized for his singing voice, and delivered a
heartfelt a cappella version of “The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee,”
Cork’s de facto county anthem. Even the slight, shy Whooley performed a
set piece, a from-memory recitation of “The Priest’s Leap,” a 74-line
Irish-nationalist poem held dear in Cork, about a defiant cleric who, on
horseback, miraculously evades a pursuing battalion of nefarious English
soldiers. Irons, in his flowing robe, took it all in mirthfully, having
evidently banished forever the cold, passionless Anglo-Saxon part of
himself.

Outside, it was a stormy night, with lashing rain and flattening winds.
But you wouldn’t have known this inside Kilcoe, where the fire crackled,
the hum of conversation drowned out the gusts, and the towers didn’t
even sway. “There’s something about the castle that generates the most
extraordinary energy,” Irons said to me. “Everybody stays up ‘til
three, four in the morning—talking, listening to music, drinking. You
just want to go on, go on. It takes a bit of getting used to, this
place. Because it does somehow produce an energy. Have you felt it?”

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